We live, simultaneously, in two different worlds. Ultimately, we live in the World of Nature, a world that we did not create and the world upon which all life depends. Most immediately, we inhabit a "human world" that we create ourselves. Because our human world is the result of our own choices and actions, we can say, quite properly, that we live, most immediately, in a “political world.” In this blog, I hope to explore the interaction of these two worlds that we call home.

About Me

Gary A. Patton

I was an elected official in Santa Cruz County, California for twenty years, from 1975 to 1995. Now, I am an environmental attorney, practicing law in Santa Cruz County. If you would like to contact me, send me an email at gapatton@mac.com.

The problem with Bush's comment, in Pitts' view, is not that Bush was being callous; "what makes his words appalling ... is the surrender they imply. 'Stuff happens?' That's what you say about the hurricane or the earthquake, the hail storm or the flood, natural disasters beyond the power of humankind to prevent. To say 'stuff happens' about a mass shooting is to suggest that mass shootings are somehow inevitable and unavoidable."

I appreciate Pitts' realization that what "happens" in the World of Nature happens according to laws that are not subject to human control, and that everything that "happens" in the human realm can be changed by human action.

In the human world, a world we create, things don't have to just "happen to us." We can make things happen the way we want them to. This idea is fundamental to the basic premise of my "Two Worlds Hypothesis."

Nonetheless, while I agree with Pitts on this point, I don't agree with his claim that the Bush comment was not "callous." Let's be honest. It was.

If you care at all about what school shootings mean for our society, I think you will want to hear what Gladwell says. Gladwell's point is similar to, but more thoroughly outlined, than an analysis put forward in an article that appeared in The New York Times on October 8th, under the headline, "Mass Killings Are Seen As a Kind of Contagion."

Gladwell divorces his analysis of the increasing number of school shootings from a call for gun control, and is particularly clear that this is not just a problem associated with persons who are mentally ill. In fact, Gladwell thinks that the rash of school shootings that began with Columbine should be evaluated with reference to a "threshold model" of collective human behavior as articulated by Mark Granovetter. Gladwell sees the series of school shootings as analogous to a "riot." The first person to throw a stone through a window lowers the threshold for future actors, and so what begins as something truly unusual becomes taken for granted, until those with even high thresholds against anti-social actions join in.

Eric Harris, who orchestrated the Columbine massacre, was a true psychopath, but he set a pattern for the future that allows those without such psychopathic attributes to copy him. Gladwell focuses specific attention on John LaDue, from Waseca, Minnesota, who came close to carrying out a well organized school attack in December 2014, an attack that was avoided only by what was clearly mere chance. LaDue, an honors student, was emphatically not a psychopath, says Gladwell.

It is my deeply-held conviction that in a world in which, literally, anything is "possible," we each learn about the dimensions of the possible by looking at what actually happens in the world we see. When we model school shootings as "normal," or "expected," we do lower the threshold and allow them to become exactly that.

And so we find ourselves, today, in a world where endless violence is the "normal." We can debate whether it is the "new" normal or the "old" normal, but violence is what we see all around us.